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Dino Mania! A Spring Break Program

The month of March was hectic for me at work. I had so many programs and collaborations going on that I didn’t get a whole of time to plan and prepare for any of them. Never good! Luckily I planned this program to be pretty simple. It was Spring Break, and that meant families would be looking for easy ways to spend quality time together. Since I was going for easy for me, too, I decided to make it a family movie day with some activities to extend on the experience.

I showed The Good Dinosaur, which was a new release, and created a few stations and activities to explore before the movie. Here are my stations.

Dino Excavation Station

I found some dinosaur figures in the party favor section of my local Wal-Mart and bought a few packs. I buried each pack in a bowl of chocolate pudding with a marshmallow surface. There were wipes at each bowl to allow kids to wipe off the dinos before they took them to a table to identify them.

Dino Safari

For this station, kids donned a mask, picked up their search sheet, and went searching around the library for those dinosaurs. Since this program was in the council chambers that’s connected to this library, the safari was a tricky way to get them into the library to look around and count them in our door count.

Kids got to keep their masks, which were also found in the party favor section at Wal-Mart. (Bookmarks above them are dinosaur-shaped and leftover from another program.)

Cave Painting

I set up a few tables in the room and draped them with black tablecloths to create “caves.” I explained that our movie would have a cave man and that humans used to make paintings as a way to tell stories. I asked them to create their own stories inside the caves.

These activities took around 20 minutes for most families to complete and when I saw that everyone was finishing up, I started our movie.

As the opening credits were playing, I pointed out exits and explained that no one’s feelings would be hurt should anyone choose to leave early. There were some preschoolers in my crowd and I said this to make them feel a little more empowered if (and when) those children got bored and disruptive.

The Good Dinosaur is not the most exciting kids’ movie I’ve ever seen. I watched it the weekend before the program and considered choosing another movie instead, but thought that since I’d advertised for this one already, I’d better stick with it. My advice would be to pass on this one as a program pick.

Did this post help you? It took around 2 hours of my personal time to share with you. If you would like to send me a dollar for my time, I would not be opposed.